Garratt reflects on 50th season at the Blyth Festival as 2024 turns to 2025
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
As far as Artistic Director Gil Garratt is concerned, the 50th anniversary season of the Blyth Festival has been one for the ages, with the number of patrons taking in Festival shows reaching pre-pandemic levels.
Garratt was kind enough to sit down with The Citizen recently to take a look back at the season that was, doing so with enthusiasm and reverence for all that was accomplished and celebrated as the storied Festival marked a half-century of putting art on stage in a village of 1,000 people.
Coming off of the high of a week’s worth of sold-out performances of Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes for its final week in Memorial Hall after the bulk of its stint being outdoors at the Harvest Stage, Garratt first talked about how great it has been for him to be in a Memorial Hall full of patrons without a seat to be had. He said that the energy in the building for a show like that is unmatched and that he always finds it so exciting to be in a house on such a night.
It wasn’t just Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz that found success as its run continued. He said a number of closing shows were sold out, to the point that, for some of the last productions of The Farm Show: Then and Now, hopeful patrons were arriving to the Harvest Stage, cash in hand, in hopes of being part of the audience. However, with a sold-out seating plan, the Festival offered up seats in the on-stage pews, which those patrons were happy to accept.
Speaking of The Farm Show, Garratt said that production was a special one for him with which to lead the season. Not only did it bring together a cast with a lot of history with the Festival, including Fiona Mongillo and Geoffrey Armour, former Young Company members, but it also marked the return of the living creators of the show for opening night, a performance of theatre that will live forever in Festival history.
On that note, Garratt said he was surprised to recently unearth an original program from the first season of the Blyth Festival back in 1975. Among the performances of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and Harry J. Boyle’s Mostly in Clover was a single weekend performance of The Farm Show in Memorial Hall. While the creators of The Farm Show remembered the production in the lower hall of Memorial Hall, which has been documented and photographed, this scheduled performance in the upper hall has been largely lost to time. So, in fact, The Farm Show was a part of the first-ever Blyth Festival season, Garratt said. He was surprised to see that, amid the often-accepted narrative of the dueling productions of The Mousetrap and Mostly in Clover, which would go on to inform the legend of the Blyth Festival, right there was a performance of the play that is often accepted as the beginning of the modern Canadian theatre movement as part of the Blyth Festival’s first season.
And while, as a lifelong theatre professional, he was happy to see the engagement from the world of theatre, both past and present, it was the real-life characters portrayed in The Farm Show that also moved the needle for Garratt. Farmers who had been interviewed for and portrayed in the original production of The Farm Show were frequent attendees of The Farm Show: Then and Now, as well as their children and grandchildren, who were keen to see what all the fuss was about. Seeing that lineage of history and the people wanting to be part of the show that meant so much to Huron County all those years ago, Garratt said, was special.
The next show in the season was also deeply personal to him. Not only did he write Saving Graceland, but it also starred his daughter Goldie. When Garratt originally wrote the show, he said, he envisioned it with a young boy at its centre. However, once Goldie found out that her father was penning a new play with a child at its heart, she hoped she would get a chance to play that child. She asked Gil why the child couldn’t be a girl and, once he took her note, he found it worked a lot better with a young girl at its centre and, before long, it was Goldie who would be on stage.
Telling a story that wove together a number of Gil’s passions and some crucial and prescient stories that yearn to be told from Huron County, such as the prevalence of kin-care and the impact of drugs in rural areas, was an important step for him as a playwright. However, the real impact on him was as a father when he saw Goldie enchant audiences and incite laughter in a way Gil didn’t expect. He even went so far as to opine that Goldie inherited her comic timing from her mother, Gemma James Smith.
He said it was just a very proud moment for him to see his daughter accomplish so much on the stage, but he also noted that her impact was felt behind the scenes as well. In the early days of rehearsing the play, one with so many serious themes and scenes, it was refreshing for the creators and actors to have a young girl around, putting stickers on their scripts, doing cartwheels when she wasn’t required for a scene and generally lightening a mood that was in such desperate need of lightening.
As the season went on, Garratt said there was plenty to be celebrated with Mark Crawford’s The Golden Anniversaries. The cast and production was another special aspect of the season, he said, which brought one of the Festival’s most beloved playwrights back to tackle the concept of a 50th anniversary and a relationship of that duration and all that it means.
Resort to Murder then provided audiences with a flat-out, fun night at the theatre, while The Trials of Maggie Pollock was there to tell yet another important local story. It was here that Garratt diverged from the lineage of the season, saying that theatres like the Blyth Festival, newspapers like The Citizen and more are the only source for local stories in rural Ontario about people the readers will know and care about. Facebook doesn’t care about telling local stories, he insisted, and Amazon Prime and Netflix won’t be producing the stories of Huron County in their next slate of releases. For those kinds of stories, with local importance and including characters from your own community, theatres like the Blyth Festival are often the beginning, middle and end of that conversation. When institutions like those, that make a career out of telling those local stories are lost, so too then will be those stories.
To close the season, Garratt said he felt it was appropriate to have Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes on the Memorial Hall stage. Telling a story of the war effort that has largely been ignored over the years, he said, within the village’s living cenotaph, is another testament to the power of local storytelling.
The enthusiasm and buy-in for that show was apparent from its premiere at 4th Line Theatre and during its run at the Blyth Festival when living Farmerettes, often in their 90s, or their children or grandchildren would make an effort to get to the theatre to see their story portrayed on stage.
Another aspect of the historical anniversary season that was ever-present throughout the summer was the slate of celebratory events that marked the Festival’s 50 years of creating original, Canadian theatre. From the opening night gala dinner with Festival founders and former artistic directors to playwright talks and Memorial Hall tours, Garratt said that he and his team endeavoured to celebrate all aspects of the Blyth Festival over the course of the season and that he found many of those events to be very rewarding.
The three sessions with Ted Johns, the Festival’s most-produced playwright and a Canadian theatre legend, in the Phillips Studio, Garratt said, were the perfect ending to a season of such events. With Johns looking back and then ahead, all with his signature humour and wit, it felt like the perfect way to say goodbye to a season that Garratt says he will remember forever.